For companies that perform any on-site services, field service management (FSM) is a critical component of modern business operations. However, implementing an FSM solution is often difficult and requires a vastly different set of skills than operating the FSM technology. Below, we explore some of the common challenges related to the technology and offer key considerations for potentially overcoming them.
Challenges in field service management projects
The need to perform field service tasks and to manage them efficiently can occur early in the customer journey, including in the presales process. On-site visits may be essential to assess an operating procedure, to take measurements to make an estimate, or conduct a trial or proof of concept in advance of a sale. On the other hand, field service operations are a critical post-sale component, often as an ongoing subscription business throughout the life of the customer relationship. Thus, FSM spans multiple functions, including sales, operations, fulfillment, customer service, finance and compliance. Each of these departments has unique requirements and dependencies on the field service team, making coordination and integration paramount.
In addition to cross-organizational dependencies within the process, FSM may span many siloed technologies, systems and databases. A successful FSM project requires seamless integration with many applications and programs such as:
- Customer relationship management
- Partner relationship management
- Configure-price-quote
- Contract life-cycle management
- Internet of Things (IoT) applications
- Enterprise resource planning
- Billing
- Payments
- Revenue recognition
- Human resource information systems
- Support
- Inventory
- Fulfillment
- Assets
These integrations are crucial to achieve a unified view of customer data and to leverage automation, especially across systems, for short- and long-term efficiency gains.
With the complex integrations often necessary, a design-first perspective is essential. Although FSM is often considered the last mile of the customer experience, it is usually the most important and can benefit the greatest from a well-thought-out design. Considering all aspects of service delivery is important, including people, processes, data and technology, to ensure a holistic solution that differentiates you from your competitors.
Tips for establishing successful FSM projects
1. Perform an assessment and set a target
Before diving into technology solutions, assess the current state of field service and develop a target operating model. This will help align business strategy and processes with the technology design by giving you a starting point to compare where you are against where you want to go.
2. Emphasize a design-first approach
Prioritize the design phase to ensure that each interaction in the customer experience is well-crafted. This approach should be holistic, taking all the stakeholders who contribute to the service delivery into account. A robust design approach requires a blend of skills across a wide range of disciplines to craft a best-practices solution that captures all of the benefits and won’t require rework later.
3. Leverage customer and field agent journeys
Conducting process design through the perspectives of field agents and customers ensures that positive outcomes are maximized and that adoption (by both customers and employees) is successful. The customer experience should be seamless, from online scheduling and notifications of estimated time of arrival, to post-visit reports and invoicing. The customer experience should reflect the strengths of your brand. The employee experience all too frequently is ignored but is critical for helping users deliver an optimal customer experience and to help retain your best employees.
4. Drive efficiencies on-site
Creating an exceptional customer experience while also driving efficiencies is possible. Best practices include:
- Proper preparation, ensuring the work order is clear, the inventory is available and on the truck, on-site assets are understood, and the customer is properly prepared and present at the time of arrival
- Quick access to knowledge-based solutions with the ability to connect with headquarters for additional assistance
- The ability to order additional parts on demand or plan an additional visit
- Automated generation of service reports, complete with images and documentation
- Immediate invoicing capabilities so that documentation can be completed on-site and with no lag time
- The capacity to address other open issues during the visit and to provide more complete customer service to improve adoption and customer success
- The ability to work off-line in locations where internet access is limited
5. Prioritize key performance indicators
Working backward from measurable goals is an important exercise to understand where your true priorities are. Some examples of field service metrics include: first-time fix rate, mean time to repair, staff utilization rate, service response time, repeat visit rate, service-level agreement compliance rate and, of course, customer satisfaction.
6. Organize service resources effectively
Ensure that service resources are properly organized by service territories and skills to optimize the deployment of field service teams. System changes become even more powerful when the business it supports is optimized to take advantage. Organizing your business is often required to get the most from your investment.
7. Structure assets and inventory
Assets should be structured, and inventory items categorized by types to facilitate easy management and deployment. Organizing your systems and data may be required to capture the benefits of your new FSM solution. While it’s always ideal to structure all external systems before embarking on an FSM digital transformation, most often it is accomplished in parallel or in phases due to market opportunity time constraints.
8. Define data masters
Establish clear sources of truth across data sources to maintain data integrity and consistency. Where do inventory, assets, skills, entitlements, contracts, etc. live and how are they kept up to date and with proper data integrity? A proper master data management model is one of the most powerful ways to deliver value in the long run.
9. Implement in phases
Many organizations take a phased approach to deliver value faster and reduce technology risk. Having the right vision is essential to making the most of each phase and minimizing rework. If not already prioritized in the first phase, business capabilities in subsequent phases often include:
- Automation: Modernizing applications as well as integration technologies across tools and databases can provide significantly more automation capabilities to increase efficiency
- IoT: The use of IoT provides the information to conduct proactive services, reduce customer downtime and extend asset life rather than reacting to customer complaints after your product has had an issue
- Customer-360 reporting and artificial intelligence: A comprehensive view of the customer enhances service quality and experience as well as insights for better decision making
10. Perform a readiness assessment
To maximize return on investment (ROI), it's crucial to align business strategy and process with technology design. This means conducting assessments and evaluating and organizing the execution teams’ skills and availability to commit to the project. Often called a readiness assessment, it’s important to evaluate whether you have all the necessary ingredients to a successful outcome up front so you do not run into severe time, skill and budget constraints when it may be much more costly to address them. Taking an honest account of the available people, skills, tools and processes will help you deliver more business value.
